Performers

Fifteen young dancers of different origins and horizons are on tour with „Crowd”, Gisèle Vienne’s epic dance piece exploring the 90’s rave scene. From theatre to theatre, the work mutates into strange, intimate relationships. Is the stage contaminating real life – or the opposite? A disturbing journey exploring our nights, our parties, our loves.

Patric Chiha is an Austrian director with Hungarian and Lebanese origins. He was born in 1975 in Vienna. After studying fashion design at ESAA Duperré (Paris) and editing à INSAS (Brussels), he directs several short and medium length films as well as documentaries („Home”, „Where Is The Head of The Prison?”, „The Gentlemen”) selected to many film festivals. In 2009, he directs his first feature film, „Domain”, with Béatrice Dalle, it is selected at the Venice International Film Festival. He continues with „Boys Like Us” (2014) and two documentaries: „Brothers of The Night” (2016) and „If it Were Love” (2019), both selected at the Berlinale. He is now working on his new fiction film: „The Beast in The Jungle”.

Identity has many layers, but there is one, which even if it’s a social construct, you cannot escape. With your subjective inner feeling, for which there is no signifier, you are bound to be alone in your skin, however much light there is outside.

Ivan Krastev, a Bulgarian essayist, has said that the relationship between "East" and "West" is like that between an imitator and his ideal. Is then the only option of the "East" to be a bastard of the "West" – same-same, but different. And when questions of race and skin come into play, and so be it, let them come – is being whitewashed East’s only option? White skin, white masks? Where can you go when you’re white, but some whites are more white than others? Oh, back where we all come from – to darkness and void. "WhiteWash" is a performative burst down the rabbit hole of identities.

Jarmo Reha is a freelancing theatre director, actor and performance artist, who was formerly a member of the ensemble of Theatre NO99. As a freelancing actor Reha has found his way to work with Armel Roussel – a theatre director residing in Brussels. They created a performance called "Long Live the Life that Burns the Chest" (2019) as an international collaboration between them. Reha will continue working with Roussel with upcoming performances "Ether/After" (2021) and "Walcz" (2022), as a co-director and actor.

In Estonia he has worked with Emer Värk as a performance artist in "You Will See So Many Pretty Things" – Kanuti Gildi SAAL (2019). As a director he created his first performance "Oomen" in 2018, which in collaboration with Aare Pilv and Laur Kaunissaare won the national theatre prize for best dramaturgy. "WhiteWash" will be his second work as a director, in which he will also be the performer.

Idea, direction, performance: Jarmo Reha

Composer and sound design: Markus Robam

Light and video art: Mikk Mait Kivi

Ideas for light art: Emer Värk

Art direction: Madlen Hirtentreu

Texts and dramaturgy: Laur Kaunissaare

Stage management: Tuuli Raadik

Producer: Eneli Järs

Producing Venue: Vaba Lava

Co-production: Volksbühne Berlin, Baltoscandal Festival

Supported by: Cultural Endowment of Estonia

Production is created within the frame of POSTWEST festival supported by the German Cultural Foundation.

Time when criminals ruled Baltic countries seems to be the time of the past. Nowadays it seems that these criminals have been legalizing their organizations and they all have moved into legitimate business, but it might not be so.

“I Had a Cousin” is created by director Valters Sīlis collaborating with playwright Rasa Bugavičute-Pēce. Rasa is half Latvian half Lithuanian. This is a story about her and her Lithuanian cousin Deimantas. They grew up together. She grew up to be a writer. He became one of the leading figures in the Kaunas mafia, who was killed in 2015 at the age of 27 by two Estonian hitmen.

This is a very personal story, told by the perspective of Rasa and observes how the cousin got more and more involved in organised crime. The performance has an aim to get a glimpse of understanding what are the social circumstances and what are the very personal motivations to become the king of the world in this way even if it means that your life can be very short.

Valters Sīlis (1985) graduated from Latvian Academy of Culture in 2010 and since has been working both in small independent theatres and on the big stage of the National Theatre. From early on, Valters became known for his documentary theatre productions that illuminated critical moments in the recent Latvian history and focusing on urgent socio-political and ecological issues locally and globally (“Legionnaires” 2011, “National Development Plan” 2013, “Lost Antarctica” 2015, “3 Musketeers – East of Vienna” 2016). Valters' inquisitive, informal and honest attitude is also present in his latest work that turns greater attention to micro-histories and choices of individuals in specific contexts, often focusing on young people (“Being Nationalist” 2017, “Boy Who Saw in the Darkness”, 2019).

5 estonians enter a specific and neat place. they are different. they have different past, understandings, political views, but they have to agree on things, because otherwise they can’t go neither further nor back. they have to find chances and tools for collaboration. they have to try and make an effort to understand themselves and the others, to understand what is going on at all. the situation is similar to cosmonauts’/astronauts’ training, when, for the sake of the best result, the students have to take their own egocentrism to the minimum, at the same time raising their empathy and being able to take decisions jointly. is it even possible? is it turning out to be a bigger brawl or a dramatic conciliation? everything is possible.

The performance is made in collaboration with the troupe.

Andres Noormets is an Estonian director and actor. He graduated from drama school of the Estonian academy of music and theatre in 1988 and after that worked in Ugala, Endla and Vanemuine theatres. He has written plays and poetry, taught action theatre and directed in radio theatre (2010 and 2016 Prix Europa prize for the best radio play). In 2015 he won the national theatre prize as the best director. As a director, both in theatre and radio, he is mainly focusing on estonian contemporary playwriting, also experimenting with the form, broadening the horizon of theatre in an audience-friendly way.

My lovers are my creators. As I am theirs. When my lover has felt that I am ready (and I always trust my lovers), then he'll allow the others to see me.

Sometimes, whole structures are built just to expose me. They're called museums. And there I am, and people come and look. If they catch me fancy, they might take a picture of me with their phone. But to some, I might have a curious effect. Some look at me and feel their heart racing, the ground underneath them becoming soft, they might even hallucinate. Doctors have named this feeling – The Stendhal Syndrome. After Stendhal.

This new production by Karl Koppelmaa tackles the most common love triangle in history (of art).

Karl Koppelmaa (28.09.1992) is an Estonian playwright-director, founder and artistic leader of KELM Theatre. His recent work can be described as pseudo-documentalist storytelling. His play "Singing Green" was awarded the Grand Prix at the "Talking About Borders" playwriting competition. It has been produced in Regensburg Theatre in Germany (titled "Der Steigerung des Glücks") and in Liepaja Theatre in Latvia (titled "Dark Side ot the Moon"). His play "for we have been taught to fear snakes" ("sest meid on õpetatud madusid kartma") was nominated as play of the year for the Annual Awards of the Cultural Endowment of Estonia.

“Lighter Than Woman“ is a poetical-documentary performance about overcoming the gravity of life in direct and indirect meaning. Norman observes Italy's only female astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti as a person who has overcome gravity literally by becoming weightless in outer space. In parallel Norman looks at Ukrainian migrant labourers who live in Italy and who have become caregivers for Italian elders and who carry their burden of final years and experience the heaviness literally by lifting them. Nevertheless, these women don’t crumble under the weight of others' lives. On the contrary, they – even without outer space – can overcome gravity. How is it possible and what role work plays in the happiness of human life are the questions examined in Norman’s piece, where documental research, poetical parallels and gravity defying gaze to the difficulties of human life are combined.

Trained as an artist, Kristina Norman is active both in the field of contemporary art and documentary filmmaking. When addressing issues of collective memory and forgetting, and the memorial uses of public space, she often searches for ways to physically and symbolically intervene in the environments in focus. While many of her art projects are presented in the form of video installations, site-specificity and performativity are of great importance in these works.

She represented Estonia at the Venice Biennale in 2009. Some of Norman’s more recent works are dedicated to the issues of migration, focusing on the aspects of memory and public representation.

Elfriede Jelinek's monumental novel "Die Kinder der Toten", her most important according to her own assessment, served as the template for a free movie adaptation, produced in the original locations near the places where the Nobel Prize Laureate grew up. A Super 8 holiday film from Upper Styria slowly turns into the resurrection of "undead" spooks. The question of the (im)possibility of adequate processing of accrued debt shoots through all those aspects – nature, culture, society and history – that are still part of national identity today.

Karin and her dominant mother stand out from the huge crowd of descending travelers. After an extravagant dinner consisting of singing and traditional Styrian dishes, the tourists are run over by a bus. Karin dies in the road accident but soon returns to the world of the living as a zombie.

Nature Theater of Oklahoma is an award-winning New York art and performance enterprise under the direction of Pavol Liska and Kelly Copper. With each new project, they attempt to set an impossible challenge for themselves, the audience, and their collaborators – working from inside the codes and confines of established genres and exploding them. No two projects are formally the same, but the work is always full of humor, earnestness, rigor, and the audience plays an essential role – whether as spectators or – just as often – as participants in the work. Using readymade material, found space, gifted properties, cosmic accident, extreme formal manipulation and plain hard work – Nature Theater of Oklahoma makes art to affect a shift in the perception of everyday reality that extends beyond the site of performance and into the world in which we live.

Directors: Kelly Copper, Pavol Liška (Nature Theater of Oklahoma)

Writers: Kelly Copper, Pavol Liška (Nature Theater of Oklahoma); based on a novel of the same name by Elfriede Jelinek

Lauri Lagle / Von Krahl Theatre Inevitability to Live at the Same Time

The first production of Von Krahl´s new troupe

One late afternoon a famous sportsman emerged to the arena. He was not the same anymore. Illness had affected him for several years and there was not much left. He coughed and smoothed out an old wrinkled sports jacket with worn out letters. Then he looked around the empty stadium that once meant so much to him. His ears were struck with the sounds of fanfares, the noise of seething spectators and passionate shouts of his coach. It was the end of November, the air was damp. “Have you ever noticed”, asked the famous sportsman silently, “how beautiful is the old town of Tallinn?”

Lauri Lagle`s direction “Inevitability to Live at the Same Time” starts at the moment when everything is going to end. People have gathered and are preparing for something. But the new horizons do not open yet. Like our lives, this is not a story but moments from lives that have been lived and from those waiting ahead.

The name of the performance is a paraphrase of a painting by Peeter Mudist.

Lauri Lagle graduated from drama school of the Estonian academy of music and theatre in 2006 as an actor. He worked in Estonian Drama Theatre 2006–2013 and also made some directions. As a film actor he has worked with Veiko Õunpuu. He was a freelance actor and director in 2013–2019, at the moment works in Von Krahl Theatre.

Who are you capable of becoming and when? What could create the courage and will to exit existing patterns, give up roles already created?

A new performance by Liis Vares is a notional sequel to “Breathe! Don’t breathe!” (premiere on 18.10.2018 at Sõltumatu Tantsu Lava). The author continues to examine the body as a material, permitting those whose lives have different needs to meet in one room. This time the focus is on experienced stage professionals, women who enjoy stops but whose urge is to move on. It is as if they are moving at different speeds and in opposite directions but they must meet on the stage. Meet the other in themselves.

Liis Vares is a freelance choreographer based in Tallinn. She graduated from University of Tartu Viljandi Culture Academy in Dance Studies BA in 2012, where she is now a guest lecturer for improvisation and composition. She is currently studying in Estonian Academy of Arts in the programme of Master of Contemporary Art. In the center of her practise is contemporary body. As a teacher and performer she is activated by an individual body experience and personal interest. Liis is dedicated to expand the meaning and reevaluate in time the notion of body and dance. The core of her activities is made by very different people with whom she is currently moving and creating.

Known for his dream-like, hypnotic universe, artist Shiro Takatani (1963–) passionately explores the origins of matter, from infinitesimal plankton to our immense star system. In this magnificent, poetic documentary, Takatani teams up with his closest collaborators, including composer Ryuichi Sakamoto, to celebrate his relationship with art and his eclectic oeuvre, ranging from dance and theatre to installations. He expresses himself simply and powerfully on his two great themes: nature and technology.

Giulio Boato studied art at the University in Italy and now lives between Italy and France, depending on the theater plays he stages and documentary films he directs. His first documentary film is a portrait of controversial stage director Jan Fabre. It was released in 2015 and broadcast in numerous film festivals over the world, it received the best art documentary award in Rome, Italy, the same year. Since then, Giulio Boato went on collaborating with Jan Fabre, recording his new shows and in particular the 24-hour long theater play Mount Olympus (2017). Last March, Giulio Boato presented at the Segal Center in New York his latest documentary on stage director Romeo Castellucci. He has created faithful and lasting bonds with artists he filmed or theater companies he worked with, as with Troubleyn and Angelos/Jan Fabre (Anvers), de Socģetas/Romeo Castellucci (Cesena), La Compagnie des Indes (Paris), Alchemy/Phil Griffin (London), Post Scriptum Company (Brussels) and DOYOUDaDA (Italy-France), which he co-founded.

His documentary project on Shiro Takatani follows the same path et was made possible thanks to regular encounters with Shiro Takatani and his collaborators.

TEKHNE is a lecture-performance-dance which investigates: what is there left to dance (in a neoliberal world, with neofascism impetuously on the rise in many countries and societies). Can dance be thought of as an anti-capitalist tool; does solo as a performing format have anything to offer anymore; can dance be the last resort? TEKHNE is looking for strategies that can be found in movement. It is a performance which strives for the poetical-philosophical rather than the didactic.

Sveta Grigorjeva is an Estonian choreographer, dancer and poet. She has published two collections of poetry „Kes kardab Sveta Grigorjevat“ (2013, „Who’s Afraid of Sveta Grigorjeva”) and „american beauty“ (2018). She has staged performances „Rebel Body Orchestra” (2017), „Carmina Trash” (2015) among others, which have caused both ecstasy and rage in audiences. Grigorjeva has danced in her own choreographies and collaborated with others in Estonia and Europe. At the moment she is finishing her Master’s degree at Justus-Liebig-Universität in Giessen, Germany.

Experiment C: “A Barbary dove couple is placed in a white, box-shaped cage, from where the female pigeon is gradually removed for a longer and longer period of time. Few days after the female has been completely removed, the male Barbary dove is ready to mate with the white rock dove, whom it has ignored so far. After some time it is ready to perform ritual bows and gurgling sounds to a stuffed pigeon, then after some time to a rolled dusty fabric, hammer and a black glove placed on a pedestal. After weeks of solitary confinement the pigeon directs its mating movements to an empty corner of the cage, where the meeting points of horizontal sides give at least an optical point of reference.”

A body that is pressed into the environment or consciousness pressed into the body – whether it is a black box, a prison or an arable land – has to deal with routine and pragmatic repetitions – a regenerating sequence and the phenomenon of how body and psychological functions adopt to it (or not) will be the subject of the work.

Planet Alexithymia is a science fictional radio drama and spectacle, which draws information from experiments, procedures, syndromes and diagnoses.

(Alexithymia is a subclinical phenomenon involving lack of emotional awareness or, more specifically, difficulty in identifying and describing feelings and in distinguishing feelings from the bodily sensations of emotional arousal.)

Karl Saks is a choreographer, dancer and sound designer. He graduated from Tartu University Viljandi Culture Academy, Performing Arts Department (BA) in 2009 and Estonia Art Academy, New Media Department (MA) in 2017. He has created three solo performances and has taken part in collaborations as sound designer in the context of theatre, movie and gallery art, as dramaturg, as performer, as directors’ assistant and as co-director. He is part of a musical collective Cubus Larvik.

“T O G E T H E R" focuses on imaginative, intuitive images and allegory. Those will be accompanied with a purified and precise vocal part.

With the magical power the synthesis of fairytale and everyday or “magical realism” offer, we will map out the different stages of solitude and loneliness. It reflects the current situation in our society – social distancing, loneliness as a true pandemic, anxiety, fear and uncertainty of the unknown future etc.

In the center of the story are the conflicted worlds of the Prince of Solitude and the food deliverer Liisa. These fairytale-like characters will represent the opposites of the mindset fed by loneliness – dark and light, negative and positive, yin and yang. The Prince tries to separate people to their mute loneliness with his seductive monologues and horrifying-beautiful visual self expression.

Liisa, on the other hand, has figured out to change solitude into a happiness tool. She offers hope for the lonely, shows way to joy and teaches how to make a difference between loneliness and being alone.

We will bring the performers and the audience together with the invisible arc of video, moving in the same direction, where the development of the new television is also going. Based on the rules of theater, everything is here and now, in front of the eyes of the audience, the production "T O G E T H E R” is based on the promise, that everything is happening in the real live moment, on air. Therefore we will not use any pre-recorded materials. Presence of the directors will not be only through the rehearsals, but during the performances as well via technical solutions and nowadays nonlinear videoconference-like montage.

Anatoli Tafitšuk is a freelance actor and director, who was part of a contemporary theatre Collective Cabaret Rhizome.

Emer Värk is a visual artist, who has been working with contemporary theatre directors over 12 years in more than 30 productions. "You Will See So Many Pretty Things" was his first artwork as a director in Kanuti Gildi SAAL in 2019.

The dance version Haptic (2008) was created on the basis of Umeda’s thoughts considering ‘colors as a form of haptic stimuli.’ By filling the stage with extreme shades, the artist challenges the audience’s body – the receptive apparatus of light – to the critical point. Deriving from the same concept, Umeda investigates further in this installation, the possibility of physically perceiving colors. When one shuts their eyes, the world usually turns pitch-black. However in this piece, when the audience is guided to a little dark room to watch a video installation with their eyes closed for two-and-a-half minutes, he or she will be clearly seeing monochrome or color lines behind their eyelids. Synchronizing with the violent electronic sounds heard from the headsets, the grid lines are physically perceived as a form of photic stimuli. After going through the seemingly paradoxical experience of seeing with eyes closed, the audience starts questioning why he or she has observed light in the darkness. They become dazed by the disparity between ‘cognition’ and ‘experience.’ Umeda, in fact, considers this work as a dance piece, since it provides the audience a physical ex- perience of chromatic vision.

Hiroaki Umeda is a choreographer and a multidisciplinary artist now recognized as one of the leading figures of the Japanese avant-garde art scene. Since the launch of his company S20, his subtle yet violent dance pieces have toured around the world to audience and critical acclaim. His work is acknowledged for the highly holistic artistic methodology with strong digital background, which considers not only physical elements as dance, but also optical, sonal, sensorial and, above all, spatiotemporal components as part of the choreography. Based on his profound interest in choreographing time and space, Umeda has spread his talent not only as a choreographer and dancer, but also as a composer, lighting designer, scenographer and visual artist. Extending from his interest in providing an unknown sensorial experience to the audience, from 2010, Umeda has been working on series of installations, which mainly focus on optical illusion and physical immersion.

Most of the information we experience is saved into the sensory memory without us becoming aware of it. An eye is a powerful sensor – our brain receives so much visual information at such a high speed that we remain, at first, unaware of most of the processing going on in the visual cortex – association cortex starts the interpretation process with a slight delay.

It is possible, by presenting the visual information at a very fast rate, to stimulate the imagination of a person and to store subliminal information in somebody. Then, it is later possible, by stimulating this unconsciously stored information, to provoke emotional reactions.

But how is the knowledge about neurological specificities in humans and about the filter of conscious and unconscious related to Romeo and Juliet? The story of Romeo and Juliet is an excellent material for experimenting with these processes. The same way that the fate of Romeo and Juliet was influenced by the processes beyond their control, we are influenced by invisible processes hidden in the shadow inside ourselves. We know what happened in the 5th act of the famous play by Shakespeare (and if not, it is possible to look it up). But what are the cognitive processes this story will activate? That we don't yet know.

It is possible that this subliminal experience will become a recognisable narrative. But it is also possible that something else will happen, something unexpected. This defines the interest in experimenting with subliminal experiencing. We are not standing on a solid ground, neither will the spectator. We are all chasing the will-o'-the-wisp and no one knows before the performance whether it'll be there this time or not. What was it, there on the edge of the peripheral vision? Don't know, might be the heart is beating too hard…

eˉlektron is a halfway virtual, halfway physical platform that connects exploratory activities of performing arts and science. eˉlektron’s core is in collaboration between artists and scientists. They work together in the format of a creative laboratory and try to do something which neither could complete without the other. Tools and prerequisites can be different, but the main driving force for both the scientist and the artist is curiosity. It binds.